Arthur O'Shaughnessy Poems

Arthur O'ShaughnessyArthur William Edgar O'Shaughnessy (March 14, 1844–January 30, 1881) was a
British poet, born in London.
At the age of seventeen, in June 1861, he received the post of transcriber in
the library of the British Museum, reportedly through the influence of Sir
Edward Bulwer Lytton. Two years later, at the age of nineteen, he became an
assistant in the natural history department, where he specialized in
Ichthyology. However, his true passion was for literature. He published his
first collection, Epic of Women, in 1870, and published two more collections of
poetry in 1872 and 1874. When he was thirty he married and did not produce any
more volumes of poetry for the last seven years of his life. His last volume,
Songs of a Worker, was published posthumously in 1881.
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Ode (O'Shaughnessy)By far the most noted of any his works are the initial lines
of the Ode from his book Music and Moonlight (1874):
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
The ode was set to music by Sir Edward Elgar in 1912.
The artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown were among
O'Shaughnessy's circle of friends, and in 1873 he married Eleanor Marston, the
daughter of author John Westland Marston and sister of the poet Philip Bourke
Marston. Together, he and his wife wrote a book of children's stories titled
Toy-land (1875). They had two children together, both of whom died in infancy.
Eleanor died in 1879, and O'Shaughnessy himself died in London two years later
from the effects of a "chill".
The anthologist Francis Turner Palgrave in his work The Golden Treasury declared
that of the modern poets, despite his limited output, O'Shaughnessy had a gift
in some ways second only to Tennyson, and "a haunting music all his own". He was
also alluded to by Neil Gaiman in his extremely popular series The Sandman in
the guise of the envoy of the The Endless (comics), Eblis O'Shaughnessy.